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About Jeremy Mendelson

Jeremy is a traveling geographer, transit planner, street designer, bike user and sustainable transportation advocate, originally from New York City and Boston. He has designed bus and rail networks for a wide range of transit agencies; toured dozens of cities and towns; and written extensively about transportation planning, social and environmental justice and equity. | Jeremy hosts the Critical Transit podcast focusing on sustainable transportation policy and practice. You can find him on the bus or driving a bicycle, inline skates, a pedicab or a truck filled with bikes. Or just follow him on Twitter @CriticalTransit.

Author Archive | Jeremy Mendelson

Like many streets.mn writers, I maintain a transit web site of my own. I’ve been asked to post selected episodes of the Critical Transit podcast here, starting with an informal conversation about winter biking. Please share your thoughts and winter cycling advice. Critical Transit Podcast Episode 42 is an informative panel discussion with four winter […]

The Southwest Light Rail debate puts transit advocates in a difficult spot. Do we champion any transit expansion even if its benefits are questionable and opportunity costs very high? Why support a major project that benefits a relatively small group of people while doing nothing for anyone else? If the reason for rejecting the Nicollet […]

It is a known issue that most drivers don’t respect most traffic laws. Recently a reader wrote to us desperately trying to figure out what can be done to make drivers follow the law, specifically stopping for pedestrians at crosswalks along the newly reconstructed Central Corridor. Nobody talks about this major problem, yet we have […]

After 12 years it’s time for a serious discussion about safety (freedom from accidental harm) and security (freedom from intentional harm). Somehow we still spend every September 11 waxing poetic about precious life and freedoms while simultaneously using it to justify things like invading sovereign countries, spying on peace activists and marketing products. Perhaps most […]

We talk a lot on this site about the impact of street design of safety and a sense of place. Things like wide lanes, one way streets, signal coordination and car parking all degrade the neighborhoods they pass through, as they prioritize vehicle throughput over everything else. A similar problem is the use of highway-scale […]

I must be a fan of small wheels. You may have seen me riding around on my little green folding bike, and I also have even smaller wheels: eight of them, to be exact, in the form of inline skates. For all the great things we can say about bicycling, in most cases you can’t […]